Startup Sales — 5 Common Sales Mistakes by Founders
August 12, 2025
Founders are responsible for the first sales a startup will make. For many founders, this is one of their very first experiences of sales and mistakes are often made.
I meet a lot of talented founders who, frankly, need to work on more difficult problems. As a general rule, your idea should be to build something 10x better than what’s currently out there. Here’s why:
Getting people to stop what they’re currently doing and switch to your product is not easy, so you need to offer a potentially big win in order to cause a change in behavior.
If you do manage to get customers with a small improvement, it will still be easy for competitors to match or beat your product. This will make it hard to scale and leave you vulnerable to customer churn.
A great way to find a difficult problem or big vision, is to imagine the world in 100 years. What would you expect to be possible with such a huge leap forward? Once you have that, you can work backwards to something more plausible in the near term.
Best of luck out there.
